Cosmology: Earth in goldylocks zone; dangerous (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 02, 2017, 12:43 (2577 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Yes, the bush of life offers a spectacle for us in its marvelous diversity. That doesn't mean God has to view it that way. All I accept is God created it. But it was on the way to a greater creation in the human brain. You see God as having enjoyment. I see Him as purposeful, while 'enjoyment' is an unknown proposition. You take what we see beyond an way of proving your suppositions. All I know is what I see He created and presume that was His purpose.

dhw: Neither of us can prove any of our hypotheses (there are no suppositions, except in your case the existence of God.) You keep talking about purpose. My theistic hypothesis, like yours, is that he purposely created what he created (in mine, he purposely created a free-for-all, with the option of dabbling). But the question is the purpose of his creating what he created! Enjoyment is a purpose, but the only purpose you have offered us for the whole vast bush of life extant and extinct is the production of the human brain so that we can think about God and have a relationship with him. Hardly a purpose for specially designing the eight-stage whale, the weaverbird’s nest, the toxin-swallowing snake, or the skull-shrinking shrew.

DAVID: Enjoyment is a concept, not material, and therefore just theory, which is probably not real in any sense.

It is you who keep emphasizing purpose, and purpose is not material. When you say your God created the bush of life in order to produce the human brain so that we would think of him and have a relationship with him, it is just theory, which is probably not real in any sense.

DAVID: The human brain is here, it is real and doesn't need to be here from a survival standpoint. What more proof do you need?

Proof of what? That your God created life so that he could produce the human brain to think of him and have a relationship with him? The duckbilled platypus is here and real and doesn’t need to be here from a survival standpoint. What does that prove?

DAVID: God has to exist. What we see is not created by chance mechanisms.

dhw: If I suggest that your God may have invented a mechanism to produce the whole bush of life, I am not suggesting that the bush of life was created by a chance mechanism!

DAVID: You are back to supporting God and denying chance. Great.

There is a mighty saltation in your thinking. You wrote: “What we see is not created by chance mechanisms.” My hypothesis is that the mechanism which has produced the bush of life is cellular intelligence, and so the bush of life is not the product of chance. My hypothesis allows for the possibility (“your God may have invented…”) that there is a God who created the mechanism of cellular intelligence. This is neither a support nor a denial of anything other than possibility.